Hey all, Just asking for your guys professional opinion on this situation. My graphic design collegues want to make banners for the site which have a transparent GIF layer for ALT tags and linking. Do you believe this will count as cloaking and incur a penalty?
Cloaking is showing different content to search engines than you show your real visitors. As long as you show the gif to both then its not cloaking. Not sure what you are actually trying to achieve by having a transparent gif though? If you put images in the page that are only there so you can stuff some alt tags with keywords then its a pretty crap tactic.
To be honest I don't know exactly why they want to do it, it's one of the graphic design things, the ALT tags are not for keyword stuffing at all. The biggest problem we have is that everything is driven by dynamic content so they sometimes have to play things a completely different way. I was just making sure you guys agreed it wasn't cloaking
Well its not cloaking but its probably a lot worse. Sounds like they don't know much about what they are doing. How can a gif have alt tags in it?
Do you mean the banner would be a background image with transparent gifs on top of it to make different areas of the banner link to different pages? The alt tags would serve to display text upon hovering the cursor over areas which aren't links? If that's the case I think you'll be alright. The gifs would probably have dimensions like 50x100 px and such? If you'd give a transparent gif dimensions of e.g. 1x1 px and make them into links, they'd appear to be hidden links. So you don't wanna do that, but that wouldn't serve any purpose in your case anyway.
Yes, I think this is what they are doing, I'm no graphic designer but those guys know what they are doiung trust me. Just a bit concerned. Thanks for your advice guys.
it is not keyword stuffing or cloaking u can use it, in clockling also there are 3 types, even if u show visitors and search bots same content but crap site with keywords that is also illegal.